Tens of thousands of Microsoft Dynamics GP users keep the accounting functions of their rms running day in and day out. They ensure that vendors get paid, customer payments are tracked, and the financial statements balance at the end of the month. In short, they provide the information critical to corporate decision making.
Of the many tens of thousands of people using Dynamics GP, the majority of them only ever use a small subset of the available functionality. They may get basic training when Dynamics GP is implemented or when they join the company; they learn enough to do their job but never look beyond this set of skills for ways to improve processes and become more efficient.
On top of this, many users start working with a particular version of Dynamics GP and continue to use the system in the same way as the years pass and upgrades are installed with many new features available.
The work gets done but good employees are left with a nagging feeling, an itch, that there must be a better way. This book is designed for those people who want to scratch the itch and learn how to get more out of Dynamics GP.
Many of the ways to get more from Dynamics GP do not require extensive knowledge of the system, merely a desire to learn and to make Dynamics GP easier, faster, and simpler. These features, tips, and techniques have been compiled into a set of recipes designed to let Dynamics GP users cook up solutions to their problems.
Like any good cookbook, the recipes are laid out into simple steps optimized for quick application and are easy to follow and get right in the first attempt. This easy gratification is designed to draw users deeper into the recipes with the goal of improving efficiency, allowing the time saved to be put back into other finance activities, or the simple pleasure of wrapping up the day and going home early.
Chapter 1, Personalizing Dynamics GP, contains recipes designed to enhance the usefulness of Dynamics GP by personalizing the look and feel of the application.
Chapter 2, Organizing Dynamics GP, contains recipes that are designed to help administrators get more out of Dynamics GP for their users by changing the way Dynamics GP is organized.
Chapter 3, Automating Dynamics GP, contains recipes that focus on efficiency and automation and are designed to be time savers across the system.
Chapter 4, Leveraging New and Updated Features in Dynamics GP, contains recipes demonstrating some of the key new and updated features in Dynamics GP 2016 from the Financial and Distribution series.
Chapter 5, Exposing Hidden Features in Dynamics GP, contains recipes on techniques that are often well known to consultants but missed by users. It contains hidden settings that can help save a lot of time.
Chapter 6, Improving Dynamics GP with Hacks, contains recipes that are used to hack existing features in Dynamics GP so as to improve efficiency.
Chapter 7, Preventing Errors in Dynamics GP, contains recipes for administrators and users to help prevent errors in Dynamics GP. It also includes ways to fix erroneous transactions that managed to make it to the general ledger.
Chapter 8, Harnessing the Power of SmartLists, contains recipes to harness the power of Dynamics GP's ad hoc reporting tool and ways to leverage the reporting power of SmartLists.
Chapter 9, Extending SmartLists with SmartList Designer, contains recipes to extend SmartLists by building your own objects from tables or SQL Views using SmartList Designer.
Chapter 10, Connecting Dynamics GP to Microsoft Office, contains recipes that help connect Dynamics GP with Microsoft Office 2013 and discusses the ways in which Office can be used to improve processes in Dynamics GP.
Chapter 11, Maintaining Dynamics GP, contains recipes for an administrator or power user to help maintain Dynamics GP.
Chapter 12, Extending Dynamics GP with Professional Services Tools Library, contains recipes which use the Professional Services Tools Library (PSTL) to ease company and data setup and to modify data in an existing Dynamics GP implementation.
Chapter 13, Modern Business Intelligence for Dynamics GP, contains recipes based on Microsoft's new BI tools, OData and PowerBI.
The following software is required for this book:
Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 with the Fabrikam, Inc. sample company deployed and a second company without any configuration created
Microsoft SQL Server 2012 or later
Microsoft Office 2016 or later
Windows Server 2012 or later with a domain controller available
An Internet browser compatible with Power BI
This book is for Dynamics GP users and Dynamics GP partners and is primarily focused on delivering time-proven application modifications. This book assumes that you have a basic understanding of business management systems and basic knowledge of Dynamics GP. All of these recipes are real-world tested and designed to be used immediately.
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Save the sheet to the desktop as Segment3Import."
A block of code is set as follows:
Delete fromSY01401 wherecoDefaultType = 13
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "In the Class ID field perform a lookup and select COMP."
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